In one of a number of memorable moments during a masterful interview with CBS’s Face the Nation, Vice President JD Vance, a convert to Catholicism, offered a rather poignant criticism of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops over immigration policy.
“I think the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has, frankly, not been a good partner in commonsense immigration enforcement that the American people voted for,” Vance said, “and I hope, again, as a devout Catholic, that they’ll do better.”
The remark was part of a longer exchange in which Vance suggested that the USCCB, which has a government contract to resettle refugees in the U.S., may be more concerned with its bottom line rather than humanitarian concerns.
“I think,” he said, “that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns, or are they actually worried about their bottom line? We’re going to enforce immigration law. We’re going to protect the American people.”
The USCCB subsequently released a statement saying that all of the people it resettles through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program are “vetted and approved for the program by the federal government while outside of the United States” and that the government funding it receives for the program does not cover its full cost.
Fair enough — the Catholic church has been doing humanitarian work across the entire world for as long as it has existed. However, it does not address the simple fact that the Catholic bishops of the U.S. have a significant financial incentive to promote mass migration for Central and South American countries. And that incentive has nothing to do with government contracts or Catholic organizations engaged in work on the southern border.
Rather, the incentive for promoting mass migration from south of the border into the U.S. has everything to do with the failure of U.S. Catholic bishops to maintain their congregations. With shrinking congregations and plenty of churchgoers withholding donations due to the church’s cover-up of sexual abuse, the collection baskets have dwindled. Compounding the financial difficulties are the increasing number of Catholic dioceses that have filed or are filing for bankruptcy to settle lawsuits and pay damages to victims of sexual abuse.
With fewer people and fewer dollars, Catholic dioceses have resorted to closing parishes and schools, many of which were built generations ago by European immigrants.
To put this decline in perspective, here are some raw numbers. In 1970, roughly 30 million American Catholics, about 55% of all American Catholics, attended church weekly. Ten years later, that percentage had declined to 42%, and by 2023, less than 20%, or a meager 13 million, of all U.S. Catholics were attending church, according to data compiled by Georgetown University.
At the same time, the percentage of American Catholics that are foreign-born has skyrocketed. In 1980, the population of self-identified Catholics in the U.S. was 56 million, of which 4.1 million were foreign-born. But in 2023, foreign-born Catholics accounted for 19 million out of 75 million Catholics in the U.S.
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In other words, foreign-born Catholics account for 75% of all new Catholics in the U.S. over the past 45 years, even as church attendance has declined precipitously. Each new arrival from the predominantly Catholic populations of Central and South America is a new congregant who contributes to the financial well-being of a parish and, thus, the diocese.
Vance was on to something when he pointed out that the Catholic bishops of the U.S. have proven a poor partner for immigration enforcement. But the reason he gave barely scratches the surface of why the Catholic hierarchy of the U.S. is eager to invite caravans of migrants from Latin America and remains hostile to the enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
